No. One directly started a company (well, two and a half), and as a CEO and general supervisor, several of the best selling US exports (and huge domestic market hits).
The other worked within the confines of a established company and co-developed C and Unix. Both had other developers already working on them. Arguably both could be created even without him, by Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan et co. And the more widely used versions of both were released by other companies later, not AT&T (the UNIX vendors of the 80's, the C compiler companies, and later GCC and Linux).
He was a great of computer science and our Unix culture in general -- just not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, turns over whole sections of the economy, and dines with Presidents.
Whether someone starts a new company to do their work or works within an existing one is completely irrelevant to the significance of their work. You're focusing on the companies rather than the people, which makes no sense considering that we're comparing the relative economic significance of the people, not their companies.
Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work. That's an unusually obvious example of standing on the shoulders of giants, and Ritchie and Thompson are the giants. Jobs just brought their work (and the work of others) to market successfully.
You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it.
>Whether someone starts a new company to do their work or works within an existing one is completely irrelevant to the significance of their work.
It very much is for the perception of their contribution though. One was a leader himself, the other was part of an established team (which could presumably do the same work without him).
>Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work.
No, it merely uses C and Unix as very basic components at the very base of it all, a C and Unix that are many times removed from the origins at that PDP-11, and have had the contributions of thousands upon thousands of people (including tons of hard work from hundreds of Apple's own engineers).
And even C/UNIX weren't created by Richie himself alone. There's BK, Ken Thompson et al too.
So, sure we can celebrate Richie as the co-creator of C and Unix but not of something as indirect and removed such as "Apple's product line".
Else, we might as well say "IBM's entire product line is built on top of the discovery of electricity". Which while true, it doesn't mean we celebrate Maxwell and Tesla for IBM's work. We don't even celebrate Turing and Von Neuman for IBM's stuff. We celebrate the company's engineers.
>You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it..
I'm not so sure. There are people who have discovered great things that went nowhere without some proxy. I think this is the naive programming concept that "marketing doesn't matter, it's just BS". Then you go code the finest program, and nobody buys/uses it.
> Else, we might as well say "IBM's entire product line is built on top of the discovery of electricity". Which while true, it doesn't mean we celebrate Maxwell and Tesla for IBM's work.
Yes we do. We celebrate Maxwell and Tesla, along with all of the other great scientists back through history, because without them and their discoveries the things we create today wouldn't be possible. That's the entire meaning of Newton's phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants. We may not mention every link in the chain every time we talk about any given product, but it is implicit that the chain is there. Every new scientist adds on to what we already have, and if their contribution is significant enough, the next generation of scientists will learn their name along with the ones we learned.
Ritchie built C. He built on Thompson's work with B, but the C programming language is Ritchie's creation. He was also not “part of an established team” when building Unix. He and Thompson built and led the team after leaving Multics. Considering that he wrote the language they built the system in and was also one of the two leaders of the team, your presumption that the same work could have been done without him is a bold one.
Steve Jobs sold some products for a while, and he did a really good job of it. He had a significant economic impact, but it was a temporary one. Future generations are not going to build on top of his work, because he didn't create or discover anything to build on top of. He was a businessman, and history will remember (or forget) him as such.
Valuing great work and discovery is not a “naive programming concept”, it's an inheritance from the scientific community. We honor those who have gone before who make it possible for us to do what we do. Without Dennis Ritchie, my working life and the things that I create would be very, very different. Without Steve Jobs, they'd probably be the exact same.
